As noted in Dan’s blog post http://open-ils.org/blog/?p=115, we’ve chosen a new path for acquisitions and serials development for Evergreen. One of the benefits of this new approach is our movement toward a more traditional development process, a process very similar to the one used in the development of the majority of Evergreen. This allows us to efficiently prototype, build, deploy, and repeat. In fact, the only real difference between acquisitions development and the traditional Evergreen development process is our collaboration with other developers in the community from the outset. The developer community is growing and acquisitions and serials development is a good example of how we’ll be growing together.

So what’s been going on for the last month?

We’ve been working through key components of the acquisitions infrastructure, including models for funds, funding sources, providers, and picklists, to name a few. Additionally, we’ve implemented finer-grained permissions handling, some of which was already planned for Evergreen, some of which is new and more detailed to explicitly handle the unique needs of acquisitions and serials management.

To the chagrin of many who are watching, the user interfaces are not the first thing we develop. As we work through use cases, our initial objective is to make sure we understand the system components, how they interact, who can access them, and in what ways. However, we do have some basic interfaces up for testing on our development server: http://acq.open-ils.org/oils/acq/picklist/list. DISCLAIMER: The interfaces are very basic and running on a development (ups & downs) server. Though components of these interfaces may be used in the final system, these were not designed with usability in mind.

Our goal for this month was to complete the basic round-trip “buy a book” scenario. That scenario is almost complete and, after ACQFest III, where some of our remote development team comes to Georgia for a 3-day planning and coding session, we should easily reach that goal and more.

March will bring more focus on enhancing the basic order work flow, user interface development, and initial models for serials control.

The question of the day, of course, is when will Evergreen have an acquisitions system? At the current rate of development, we should have functional core acquisitions functionality in April, with serials control following along generally about month behind.

We always encourage and appreciate feedback. As you check in and watch the interfaces evolve, let us know what you think.